As I wrote in part one, on the first pass of DUO 3.0 the job was comprehension, and on the second, speed. From the third pass on, change the goal once more. This time it's can say. A sentence you can read and get the meaning of, and a sentence you can use for your own purposes, are different things, and what fills the gap is not memorization but conversion practice. What you keep at hand is only DUO 3.0 (print) and the review CD audio. You add no new materials.
The Third Pass Has Three Jobs: Reading Aloud, Shadowing, and Conversion from Japanese
First, reading aloud. Play one sentence from the review CD, stop it, and say it aloud while looking at the text. Reading aloud is a warm-up that accustoms your mouth and ears to that sentence's rhythm; don't chase the meaning deeply here. Next, shadowing. Without stopping the audio, layer your voice slightly behind it. The target is not meaning but the shape of the sound. Copy, together with your mouth's movements, where in the sentence the strength is placed and where it flows weakly.
The main event is the third: conversion, saying the English while looking at the Japanese. Look only at the book's Japanese translation and say the English aloud. Even if the sentence you produce differs from the correct English, if the meaning and skeleton match, move on. Conversely, mark the ones where you stall at the start of the sentence, or mistake the verb form, as sentences I can't say yet. Because DUO's example sentences pack in both words and grammar per sentence, the place where conversion fails becomes, as-is, the place of your own weak parts.
Once a week, it's good to record that week's conversion all the way through. A phone recording app is enough. Listen to your own voice alongside the source audio and the places become clear: even sentences you thought you could say trail off at the end, or have a gap before you start. Those places become next week's loosening targets. For records, just the audio file's date is fine; no elaborate study log is needed.
Loosen Only the Sentences You Stalled on, with Segment Repeat
A sentence you stalled on in conversion, loosen it that same day. The method is segment repeat. The review CD's basic mode is a through-play of all 560 sentences in about 60 minutes, but all you need to loosen is the single stalled sentence. If you put the audio into a segment-repeat app — like Rehear, made by the team behind this magazine — that lets you jump back and forth phrase by phrase and repeat a specified range, the work of hitting one sentence over and over becomes dramatically easier. Just eliminating the hassle of hunting for the rewind position makes the density of practice completely different.
The loosening order is fixed. Listen to just that sentence twice at a slower speed, then read it aloud three times, pausing at the meaning breaks, and finally say it again looking only at the Japanese. If you can say it, that sentence graduates from today's share. The stalled sentences left in a day are at most two or three, and five minutes is enough for the loosening. Rather than repeating all sentences evenly, concentrating time only on the stalled ones raises the can-say rate of all 560 faster. For a stalled sentence, write just the date, small, in the book's margin. When three dates line up on the same sentence, that's the signal to return that sentence not to conversion but to understanding its parts.
A 15-Minute, One-Section Daily Menu
The daily unit is one section — 12 to 13 sentences — fixed at 15 minutes. The breakdown: in the first 3 minutes, run yesterday's section through shadowing. The next 8 minutes are the core: convert today's section from Japanese to English. In the last 4 minutes, loosen only the stalled sentences with segment repeat. With this allocation, five days a week advances five sections, and you can cycle through all 45 sections in about nine weeks. Progress being countable per sentence is DUO's strength; whether today's share is done never gets vague.
Fix the can-say judgment at three criteria. You can start saying it within two seconds of seeing the Japanese. You can say it to the end of the sentence without stalling. And when you record it and compare with the source audio, the placement of strength isn't far off. Put a graduation mark on sentences meeting these three, and remove them from the conversion-check targets from the next round on. Only the remaining sentences become the center of the next menu, so with each round the time per section gets shorter.
What Not to Do on the Third Pass
Decide what not to do in advance, too. Don't buy additional new vocabulary books. Don't copy out derivatives and synonyms into a notebook again. Don't let all 560 sentences wash over you evenly from the start. And drop the perfectionism of reciting every sentence without dropping one. Time on the third pass is finite, and the sentences you can say grow by exactly the amount you shift toward conversion and loosening. Adding materials can wait until after the graduation rate of the 560 comes into view.
DUO 3.0 can be used for a long time precisely because you can change the job with each pass. Rotate the sentences you understood at speed, and bring the rotated sentences closer to your own words through conversion. From the third pass on is that final process. Because there's a cap of 560, you can count the sentences graduating. Countable progress becomes a reason to continue.
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